


Iatrogenic

by myadamantiumheart



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Friends to Lovers, Multi, UST
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-08
Updated: 2017-02-07
Packaged: 2018-09-22 20:07:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9623474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myadamantiumheart/pseuds/myadamantiumheart
Summary: Bones has a problem shaped very much like one James Tiberius Kirk, and that problem may or may not have been created entirely by her. (Or, in which the author fucks around with timelines and the scientifically proven irresistibility of Kirk’s persuasive powers.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Iatrogenic: pronounced īˌatrəˈjenik: adjective
> 
> Definition: a condition induced inadvertently by a physician or surgeon

To many of the crew members aboard the Enterprise, it had seemed odd, at first. That Dr. Lena McCoy was so gruff, bitter like three day old coffee and with the stormiest of frowns perpetually threatening the horizon of her (admittedly striking) face. That someone whose entire job was mustering the compassion to treat the crew, day in and day out, would be so- prickly, putting it kindly. Her bedside manner was notoriously awful, and even the Captain himself wasn’t safe from her admonishments. 

The first three months of their mission had been spent tiptoeing around the woman, hiding injuries that didn’t really need a trip to sickbay, and apologizing profusely for daring to get hurt when she did find them out. And she always found them out. Say what you want about her grim manner, there was a reason why Lena McCoy had graduated medical school so early. (Some people might say that same reason was why she’d been divorced at 30 and was now magnetically stuck to Kirk’s side out here in the black.) 

So the first three months were rough, and let it never be said that Lena, for all her stubbornness, couldn’t read a room. She knew, from the very beginning, that she wasn’t making any friends on board with her snappish tone and her stern chastisement of every other yeoman. But she wasn’t here to make friends, was she? She had Jim, the damned clinger, and Uhura inexplicably seemed to like her, and Chapel at the very least put up with her bossing and fussing. A solid majority of the crew watched her warily every time she walked down the hallways with Kirk at her side, wondering loud enough for her to hear about why the captain had picked such a bitch of a CMO. Kirk, gracefully enough, pretended not to hear it. He let her pick her own battles (for once) on this. She would have avoided the battle entirely, not gauging it to be very necessary. No one had to like her; they just had to let her make sure they weren’t going to die of some godforsaken space illness, or a bloody side wound. 

\---

But then, somewhere around the fourth month, things started to change, entirely without her permission. It must have started with the captain; things that Bones didn’t like usually did. He got hurt, on a ground mission, stumbling off the transport pad with a shirt hanging off him in shreds and blood gushing from a wound in his thigh. 

“You fucking idiot,” she’d said, letting M’benga shove Kirk none-too-gently onto the gurney for her and ripping a bigger hole in his uniform pants, slamming a wound-seal patch over the gash as she grabbed at his wrist for a pulse. 

“Don’t sweet talk me too much, Bones, you know what it does to me,” Jim had slurred, grinning stupid and delirious up at her, and she’d let the barest hint of an exasperated smile slip through before she was barking orders at people to get out of the way so they could bring him down to the sickbay and get him stabilized. Once he was sleeping, well under control and no longer bleeding out, she’d pulled the covers of the bed up over him and left him under the capable watch of Chapel. Unfortunately, there had been several other members of the away team in the bay, who had apparently seen her pulling her equivalent of doting on the Captain. And word spread around a starship like a Venutian flu, infecting everyone on board with the thrice-damned idea that Dr. Lena McCoy was in possession of a soft spot. 

“The talk around the water cooler is that you’ve got a crush on the Captain,” Chapel told her a few days later, barely able to hide her smirk at Lena’s aghast expression. “Everyone who’s anyone apparently saw you actually smile at him and then sit by his bedside weeping hoping he would pull through his terrible ordeal.” Lena can’t even bear to respond to something that ridiculous, so she gets her revenge by being exceedingly curt with every red shirt that comes her way that day, and then scheduling Chapel to do Alpha shift the day after the next shore leave, when all the hungover crew members will be puking into emesis basins in the ‘bay. 

The next hint of softness comes just a week and a half later, when Chekov catches a terrible case of nebular fever, probably off the crew of another fleet ship he’d beamed aboard to help fix their faulty navigation system. He’s delirious, sweaty and fevered and absolutely dramatically ill, bundled up in a cooling bed in the sickbay for four days straight. At one point, he gets scared, the type of ill fright that children get when the fever begins to confuse them beyond their capabilities. And Chekov is so small seeming in the bed, dwarfed beneath the giant cooling pads, with his pale forehead and his pained blue eyes. 

On the gamma shift when he reaches the height of his hallucinations, she spends the entire eight hours with her small, capable hand on his forehead or holding his when he reaches out to her, murmuring platitudes and keeping him steadily dosed with an anti-inflammatory to prevent any of that dangerous lower extremity swelling that nebular fever is known for. There are no other patients, blessedly, so she can idly flick through charts and schedule people for their check ups and boosters on her PADD while still comforting the child. 

He’s only twelve, thirteen some years younger than she is, but when she looks at Chekov, she still sees a teenager, scared but determined, oddly capable but sweet as sugar. She sees a little of Joanna, before Lena’s own shortcomings chased Jocelyn out of her arms and she’d chased herself off the planet. She sees a little of the daughter she gets to visit through the video screen, and it makes her heart clench up, creaking like a rusty hinge. Twelve or thirteen years is enough to make Lena feel a lifetime older. It takes Chekov a week to get better, after those four days spent writhing in the grip of the fever, and when he’s fully well he leaves her a bar of chocolate that he must have either smuggled aboard or bribed someone for on her desk in thanks, for sitting by him and making sure he didn’t suffer through it alone. She would appreciate the gesture, if it hadn’t come with him telling anyone that would listen what a good bedside manner she has.

No one seems to believe it, at first, but then Uhura chimes in (just once, but once is enough on this fucking gossip mongering heap of tin) about how back at the Academy Lena had nursed her through a tough bout of bronchitis, and now her name is on everyone’s lips every time she so much as breathes. 

Now she can’t shake the crew’s stares out of her unruly bob of hair, because despite her best efforts, no one is scared of her anymore. Not after she’d shown her hand like that. Jim seems to find it hilarious. 

“I knew they would find out that you’re a little marshmallow one of these days,” he grins at her over his glass of replicated bourbon (never as good as the real shit), and she flings a pillow off her couch directly at his face. The infuriating man just bats it aside, slouching even further into the armchair. “You couldn’t keep that secret close to your chest, Bones. You’re a carer, and it was bound to come out soon enough.” 

“You shut your whore mouth, James,” she huffs, but it is, terribly enough, true. She’s not exactly easy to get along with, nor is she particularly soft, but her most horrible secret is that Dr. Lena McCoy cares so much about her patients that sometimes it feels like it’ll suffocate her. It’s why she studied so hard. It’s why she puts up her walls, and hides behind her armor. It’s why she followed Jim out here in the first place, because she couldn’t imagine letting him face the probable dangers of deep space alone, no matter how terrified she was of it herself. So after that, the crew doesn’t seem very afraid of her, and people start actually coming for their post mission checkups, and no one looks at her like she’s about to shove a hypospray up their ass when she asks them a simple question, like “where in the hell is our fucking Captain, I’m going to tie him to the bed next time-”. 

Instead, they laugh, and point in the direction he’d quickly limped off in, and she can finally say she’s got enough connections aboard that Jim has nowhere to hide from her tricorder. It looks like things are looking up, even though now she has to puff herself up like an owl to seem intimidating (at 5’4’’ it’s very difficult to loom), and Spock has gotten an irritating habit of asking her research questions that he could just ask his PADD, like he’s trying to  _ befriend _ her or something. It says something, doesn’t it, that she’s possibly more emotionally stunted than a half-Vulcan. 

But then, just half a year out from blessed terra firma, things go terribly, disgustingly wrong. 

\---

It’s not exactly Jim’s fault, but Lena will be damned if she doesn’t curse his name every night for the rest of her life. He’s gotten better at diplomacy; the man’s a certified genius, and his cockiness hides a calculating mind. Sometimes people forget, because he’s the most personable captain Starfleet has ever seen. But Jim’s fucking smart, underneath all his friendliness and his rote flirtation. Still, upon discovery of a planet that they were not informed was hostile until it was far, far too late, his diplomacy skills are just a little bit lacking. Which is why Lena finds herself wearing just his shirt and her regulation underthings in some damp cave on this hellhole of a planet, looking at the stone bars of their prison and wishing Jim would just shut his damn mouth. She’s cold, enough so that she’s beginning to worry a little about her own health, for once, and he’s sitting up against the wall with a fire of fury in his eyes. The crew knows where they are; theoretically, Scotty could probably beam them up right now, but that means they’re risking legal issues with the species on this planet, and the Federation would probably make that into a hell of a lot of paperwork. 

By the time she starts really shivering, two hours have gone by, with her pacing the length of the cell and no sounds to indicate that the humanoid, rocky-metallic skinned aliens on this planet are coming back for them. Jim notices that she’s got gooseflesh all down her legs before she does, and it’s only when he reaches out and lays a warm hand against her side to stop her from making another lap that she notices it too. 

“Christ, Bones,” he says, voice a little gravely from one of the bigger aliens picking him up by the throat earlier. “You’re going to freeze, come here, let me give you my pants.”

“And have you freeze?” she mutters, kicking at him sullenly, not too proud of herself at the moment. Stupid, stupid, coming on a mission like this. Sulu would have been a better fit, with far more developed combat skills. Or Uhura, with her language abilities. Jim laughs a little, that infuriating chuckle he pulls out when he’s amused by her, like someone fondly watching a grumpy puppy nip at their ankle. He doesn’t ask her for permission before using his other hand (broad, calloused, warmer than it has any right to be) to pull her, flailing, into his lap. 

“I was in the boy scouts,” he says imperiously, that familiar childishly amused glint in his eyes. “And I’m pretty sure I remember something about sharing body heat.” 

“You got kicked out after a month,” Bones says, but she lets him wind his unfairly muscular arms around her, because she has no doubt that her stubbornness in this situation could likely actually get her killed. She’s starting to feel the numbness in her toes, which she can thankfully tuck up under her legs in this position, letting Jim cradle her small form to his broader one entirely. “I just don’t understand why I’m the one who had to lose her clothing, here. You’re the one who tried to fight them.”

“Len,” Jim says, barely suppressed laughter in his tone. “You punched one of them, right in what I would argue is the genital region. It’s hard to tell, because of all the rocks, but I think they took that as a more viable threat than me being unable to reach their faces with my fists. Also- that? Fighting. Definitely fighting.” 

“I’ll fight  _ you _ ,” she says mulishly, but the shivering is increasing even as she tries to huddle against her friend, so the effect is somewhat muted. It goes away as soon as Jim’s warmth manages to seep in deep enough to calm her shaking muscles. And then, there are another two hours, of mostly silence, just Jim murmuring occasionally, wordlessly, as he pulls her closer when she starts to shiver again. He rubs calloused hands along her legs, which, she notices for the first time in years, are startlingly small under his massive palms. She’s not the smallest woman, she knows. She’s not exactly tall by any means, but she’s stocky. She’s got what her grandmama would call child-bearing hips (not that she ever got the chance to use them,) and finding a bra is a pain and a half on the best of days. The mandatory Starfleet training had turned the softness in her stomach into something more compact, but the stomach was definitely still there. So she’s not exactly used to feeling like someone can scoop her up in one hand, because she isn’t usually sitting in Jim’s lap. Or anyone’s lap, for that matter. 

She knows, objectively, that she might be getting a little bit delirious. She’s starving past hungry, she’s still cold despite not shivering any longer, and she got less sleep than optimal last night. Add that to the fact that the darkness of their cell is highly disorienting, and you have a somewhat confused, utterly enraged Lena McCoy on your hands. So when the aliens come back, something like apology in the set of their rocky frames, she can’t be blamed for the growl of anger that Jim, thankfully, muffles against his shoulder by pulling her strongly and protectively against him. 

“My CMO is going to freeze to death down here,” Jim says, barely reined in thunder in his tone rumbling through her frame. “And I’d like to know how I can make amends for our earlier behavior so that I can get her some clothes, and get us out of here.” 

“We did not realize we had such a warrior visiting us,” the being at the entrance of the cell says, as it unlocks the gate. Lena can practically feel Jim’s ego bursting underneath her, warring with his stern captain tone and his need to get them the hell off this fucking planet. He starts to say something, but the alien keeps going. “She is fierce beyond what we know of ones so small.” Jim stops, at that, and then he starts laughing, uncontrollably, probably a little delirious too. 

“Oh, oh my god,” he laughs, cradling Lena a little closer and somehow levering the two of them up. She would make him put her down, but she also lost her shoes in the kerfuffle earlier and she doesn’t really want to get some form of alien tetanus. He holds her close in a cradle and steps towards the entrance of the cell, and the alien nods. “You don’t know the half of it,” he says, briefly pressing his chin to the top of her head. 

“The council has spoken,” the alien says, letting them pass into the hallway and leading them upwards, back up towards the surface. “They were impressed upon by the might of her fury, and wish to speak with you directly.” Jim laughs again, pressing his lips to her forehead, and murmuring, lower than the alien can hear-

“God, I knew one of these days that stick up your ass was gonna come in handy.” 

She can’t be blamed if she elbows him hard enough in his still healing bruised rib from last week that he wheezes and almost drops her. 

\---

They give her clothing, oh do they- some flowing gown better off in a classy reproduction play of ancient Greece, a toga of brilliant blue sweeping around her with golden chains for a belt. The alien who bring it to her tuts over her hair, amazed by it, and brushes it back behind her ear with a surprisingly gentle, pebbled finger. Jim doesn’t get anything special, just his shirt and shoes back. The rocky, rough hewn palace is warm within, the faintest hint of sulfur in the air hearkening to probably geothermal power running the whole place. Jim swallows harshly when he sees her, surly and with shoulders hunched, feeling obviously out of place. He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and then- 

“I’ll have Chapel bring you an extra uniform, when we beam aboard,” his voice is curt, something lurking beneath it. “I assume you don’t want to resume duties in the sickbay like this.” He’s right, but for some reason it bothers her, that he wants her out of this and back in her plain old black pants and blue shirt. That he doesn’t want anyone to see her like this. That he doesn’t seem to want to see her like this. But she doesn’t have much time to examine that, that strange tugging feeling, before the doors of the grand hall open and she’s ushered in, before a cabal of gleaming, iridescent, metallic beings. 

The long and short of it is that their warrior culture doesn’t really want anything to do with Jim Kirk and his mission of unity, but they’re willing to consider a treaty if they’re informed ahead of time about a party coming to liase with them, and if McCoy is the one heading it. Because they’re impressed, somehow, by her small stature and inability to change her genetic resting bitch face. They’re impressed by the fact that she managed to significantly shock their soldiers, despite being about half their height. Jim is absolutely insufferable about it all, of course, hooking an arm around her shoulder, still bare from the ridiculous gown as they climb up a peak to where Scotty will beam them up. Jim’s already radioed for Chapel to bring the extra uniform to the transporter bay. 

“Look at you,” he says, though Lena can note that he is most definitely conspicuously still not looking at her in the gown. “Your first little diplomatic accomplishment.” 

Oh, she’s going to murder Jim Kirk, one of these days. 

\---

They don’t talk about the dress. No one talks about the dress, because only three people aside from Jim saw it. But it hangs in her closet in her quarters, for reasons unknown to even her. She’s kept it, while most things she receives from alien civilizations (which rarely happens in the first place), end up in the archival storage. Sometimes, when she’s changing out of her clothes after a long shift, shoving them into the little cleaning machine at the bottom of her closet, she stops and runs her fingers along the soft material, thinking about the woman she saw in her reflection when she’d beamed aboard. 

Lena McCoy hasn’t cared much for looking pretty since maybe her wedding day, since the ultimately tense date nights with Jocelyn, since the one time she deigned to go to a party at the academy. She doesn’t see much use in it, really. There’s always someone’s blood getting on her, or medications, or alien spores, or, god, disgustingly enough, someone’s  _ other _ bodily fluids. 

She closes the closet door, and she turns away, and she resolutely ignores it. 


End file.
